A free checker is a good start and a poor finish. It finds the problems a machine can measure, like text that's too faint or an image with no description, and it does that quickly and for free. What it can't do is use your website the way a person does. For that, someone has to sit down and try.
Who accessibility is for
When people hear "accessibility," they often picture a small group of visitors. It's a bigger group than that. It's the customer with low vision who enlarges the text, the one who's blind and listens to your site through a screen reader, and the one who can't use a mouse and moves through every page with the keyboard. It's also the customer reading your site on a phone in bright sun, the one with a broken wrist this month, and the one in their seventies whose eyes aren't what they were.
For a business that serves homeowners, that last group is often a big share of the people deciding who to hire. A site that works for all of them is a site more customers can finish using. Our accessibility statistics page has the figures.
Myth: Some owners say nobody with a disability uses their site. It can look that way, because analytics don't show who uses a screen reader or enlarges text, and people who can't use a site leave before they become a number.
The standard everyone measures against
Accessibility has a shared rulebook: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, known as WCAG. The current version is 2.2, and the level most organizations aim for is AA. In plain words, AA covers the things that most often stop people: text you can read, controls you can reach with a keyboard, forms that say what they want, images that are described, and pages that still work when someone enlarges them.
Free checkers test against parts of that standard. The parts they can test are the ones a machine can measure.
What a checker is good at
Run one. Most take a minute, and the results are worth having. A checker reads your page's code and flags what breaks a written rule: contrast below the required ratio, form fields with no label, images with no alternative text, headings out of order. Those are real problems, and a checker finds them on every page faster than any person could.
Checkers come in a few kinds. Some run inside your browser and check the page you're looking at. Some are websites where you paste your address and get a report on a page or the whole site. And some are built into the browser's developer tools, a click away for whoever manages your site. Any of them is a reasonable first pass, and running two often catches a little more than one.
What it can't judge
A checker can't tell whether a description makes sense. It can see that a photo has alt text, but not that the alt text says "IMG_4471." It can't feel what happens when someone moves through your site with the Tab key and the highlight slides out of sight behind a sticky header. It can't hear a screen reader announce your menu as "button, button, button." These are judgment calls, and they're often the ones that stop a customer cold.
That's why a site can get a perfect automated result and still have problems a person finds in minutes: form borders too faint to see, a floating button that covers part of the page, text that breaks apart when someone enlarges the spacing to read it. A perfect result tells you the machine is satisfied. Only a person can tell you the site works.
How to read the report you get
If your checker's report runs to hundreds of items, don't read it top to bottom. Read it by cause. A long list is usually shorter than it looks: our founder, Ash Harris, wrote about a typical report where 1,746 barriers came down to 34 fixes (opens in a new tab).
- Look for the repeats. The same problem listed on every page usually lives in one place: the header, the footer or a form used across the site. Fix it there and it's gone everywhere.
- Separate errors from warnings. Many checkers list "things to review" next to actual failures. They're worth a look, but they aren't the same thing.
- Ask where the work is. Whoever built your site should be able to say which template each problem comes from. That turns a long list into a short one.
- Keep a dated note of what you found and what you fixed. If questions ever come, that record is worth more than any score.
Five checks to do yourself
After the checker, give your site fifteen minutes. You don't need special software, and you'll learn more about your site than any report can tell you.
- The keyboard. Put the mouse aside. Press Tab to move through your homepage and your contact form, and Enter to press buttons. Can you always see where you are? Can you finish the form and send it?
- The zoom. Zoom your browser to 200%. Does the text get bigger without overlapping, and can you still reach the menu?
- The screen reader. Turn on your phone's built-in screen reader (VoiceOver on an iPhone, TalkBack on Android) for five minutes. Does the menu say what each item is? Do your photos have descriptions that make sense out loud?
- The sunlight. Take your phone outside and read your homepage. Faint gray text and pale buttons show up fast in daylight.
- The mistake. Fill in your contact form wrong on purpose: skip a field, mistype your email. Does the form tell you clearly what to fix, right next to the field?
If you get stuck on any of these, so does a customer.
What a full review adds
When we build or review a site, we test it against WCAG 2.2 AA two ways. Automated tools, including Google's Lighthouse tests, check every page for the measurable rules. Then a person goes through the site by hand: keyboard only, a screen reader, enlarged text and spacing, forms filled in right and wrong. Every problem found goes into a written record with the date, what was wrong and what was done about it.
That record matters as much as the fixes. It shows the work was done, and it makes the next review faster. Accessibility isn't a box ticked once. Sites change, content gets added, and the review gets repeated. Our accessibility page covers how we build it in from the start.
What about the law?
Whether your business is legally required to make its website accessible is its own question, and an important one. We answer it separately in Can a small business be sued over its website's accessibility? The short version for this article: a checker's report isn't a legal answer either way, and a dated record of the work you've done is worth keeping.
The same work helps you get found
Much of what makes a site usable with a screen reader is what helps search engines and AI assistants read it: real headings in order, images with descriptions, links and buttons that say what they do, forms with labels. Accessibility is about people first. It also makes your site clearer to the tools your customers now use to find a business, so the work pays twice.
A checker is the first pass
Run the checker. Read its report by cause. Then try your site yourself, and get a person's review before you call it done. The site is done when a person can use it.
If you'd like a second set of eyes on your report, let's talk.
